In hindsight I may have reacted too harshly, but this was his eyesight we were dealing with, and I knew that any damage done would be permanent. And he is more and more thinking himself The Wisest, probably because he is the oldest and, compared to his brothers and baby sister, he is the The Wisest, though he has yet to learn that that sampling of four children that he dominates is hardly a cross-section of the entire world’s population.

I set up my camera and tripod and set the timer for ten seconds. I brought the kids in to look at the red blinky light (which they loved) and got a few pics of all of us, them looking lovely and smiling at the camera (or the red blinky light on the camera) and me looking like I’m trying not to think about how the sun just went behind clouds and now the light is gone and the room is too dark. It was just a practice run, and I’ll try again.

I’m a perfectionist, and I don’t like to share things that haven’t passed my rigorous examination of “worth revealing to the general public.” (On a related note, even things that pass this exam almost immediately fail the same exam after their having been revealed–it’s just part of the cycle. There’s always next time and I’ll do better, then. I hope.) I don’t want to put motives in God’s mind, but I have a sneaking suspicion that that perfectionism is the reason why I have three strong-willed boys three-and-under.

To show that I’m learning, I’m sharing a fragment of a photo from a practice run, where the room suddenly went dark as the sun ducked behind clouds, and the two-year-old suddenly dashed out of the picture, and I have a comical look on my face because the baby started crying just as the red blinky light started pulsating and I’m holding his pacifier in his mouth and saying, “Don’t start crying now!” And he did, anyway.

What I like about it is that my hands look somehow weathered and older than they really are. They are the hands of a persevering, semi-recovering perfectionist. It’s not a very good photograph, but it’s a very real one.

Follow Us

Some nesting periods start rather mildly, with the washing of baby clothes and assembling of cribs. Others are a little more forceful, with packing up your bedroom and your nursery and informing your husband that